Tucker: Rule of law has been suspended on the border
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host says Biden's aid is encouraging illegal migration
Joe Biden may have lost a step, but his handlers work fast. Within hours of the inauguration in January, Biden’s White House opened America’s borders to the world — not simply to job seekers and gang members from Mexico and Central America, but to varieties of illegal migrants from all over the globe – from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Virtually anyone who could get to Mexico was admitted into the United States without a visa. In some cases, foreign nationals whose identities we can’t verify were flown to the interior of our country and permanently resettled without the permission of the people who already live there. Americans. How did migrants from Congo get to Lewiston, Maine? And why? Well, because Susan Rice very much wants to change Maine’s demographics, as well as the population mix in every other state in the union. So the administration is working to do that, by fiat, without a vote in Congress or public consent of any kind. By definition, this is the most radical possible attack on the core premise of democracy, which is that citizens get to run their own country. Not foreigners, citizens.
The leaders of the Democratic Party no longer believe in democracy as constituted, and they definitely don’t plan to lose another election. So, as the rest of us go about our lives, they’re importing huge numbers of new voters into the United States. When you say this out loud, they become absolutely hysterical and call you names. But they do that only because it’s so obviously true.
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Unfortunately for Susan Rice, this is one change to the country that’s very hard to hide. If you live within 100 miles of the Mexican border, you’re watching it happen in real-time.
On the border, the rule of law has been suspended. The American system of order and decency and fairness is being mocked and destroyed by the very people in charge of sustaining it. You don’t have to be a conservative Republican to be offended by this. Last November in Texas, many thousands of lifelong Democrats with Mexican last names voted for Donald Trump. Why? Because they knew perfectly well what the left planned to do at the border. They were right. They’re patriotic Americans. They didn’t want to see their country destroyed. So for the Joe Biden administration, this is a very serious political problem. Most people, no matter what their color or political registration, think Joe Biden’s current immigration policy is lunacy. Because it is. Opening the border is the single most unpopular thing the White House has done, by far.
Biden’s handlers understand this could be a disaster for them. So this weekend, they dispatched Kamala Harris to Central America, with orders to pretend she’s trying to fix it. Harris, you may remember, is the shallow political opportunist from California we’re often told is some sort of civil rights hero-slash-moral leader. On Sunday, Harris flew to Guatemala, to unveil her policy to address the crisis. What is it? In a word, the plan is bribery.
The administration plans to spend billions of dollars to pay Latin America’s poor not to move to the United States. CNN loves the idea of course. It blames America.
"Kamala Harris' Visit to Central America Signals a New Chapter," the channel slobbered in a headline this morning. But there’s nothing actually new about this. We’ve seen this cartoon before.
Six years ago, as Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden announced what he called "A Plan for Central America" in the New York Times.
The idea at the time was the idea now: once we sent billions to corrupt foreign governments, their citizens would stop showing up in Texas and California. So we tried it. How’d that work exactly? Let’s see. We now have more people from Central America coming over our border illegally than at any time in decades, possibly ever. So it didn’t work very well.
That’s obvious to everyone but Joe Biden who seems to have noticed this. In April, he told Congress that his plan was a brilliant success.
JOE BIDEN: When I was vice president, the president asked me to focus on providing the help needed to address the root causes of migration. And it helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. The plan was working, but the last administration decided it was not worth it. I’m restoring the program and asked Vice President Harris to lead our diplomatic effort to take care of this. I have absolute confidence she’ll get the job done.
So the last administration was weak on border security. Got it.
But the sentence to pay attention to is the claim that people from Central America are "forced" to come here. By whom? By us, of course. We’re not keeping up with our bribes to the drug traffickers who run Honduras. It’s our fault. Better restart the payments or someone could get hurt. But it’s all a lie. Foreign aid almost never accomplishes what we pretend it will accomplish for the people for whom it’s intended. If you think otherwise, explain Africa. For more than 50 years, the west, the U.S. in particular, has bombarded the continent with taxpayer and NGO money, as well as all the stupid and very patronizing assumptions that accompany it. The result? Is there a single African country that’s better off, less corrupt and more self-sufficient? Take an hour or two to check that fact sometime. It’s hard to find a single country. Foreign aid projects are where liberal arrogance goes to die. They almost never work for the people they’re supposed to work for. Sorry. They don’t. It sounds like they would, but they don’t. Even The New York Times conceded this.
Over the past 10 years, Guatemala alone has received more than a billion and a half in U.S. aid. What’s the result of that aid? Small country, $1.5 billion. According to the paper, poverty and malnutrition in Guatemala have risen to unprecedented levels. Surprised? When was the last time welfare made someone stronger or happier? The same is true with countries.
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If anything, Joe Biden’s aid package encouraged illegal migration to the U.S.
Michael Clemens, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, studied the data on this. Clemens found that "foreign aid focused on economic development is actually associated with increases in emigration from poor countries."
Of course, that’s true. The only surprise is that we’d be surprised. Heathy places are by definition self-sufficient places. Dependence, by contrast, breeds misery. That’s always true. Misery causes people to flee, and they have.
Kamala Harris is no genius, but she must sense this. She knows more bribes won’t work. So instead of defending her plan on the specifics, she's taking the easier and far more familiar road: more babbling about racism and sexism, and of course, climate change.
KAMALA HARRIS: There are also long-standing issues that are often called the "root causes" of immigration. We are looking at the issue of poverty and the lack, therefore, of economic opportunities; the issue of extreme weather conditions and the lack of climate adaptation; as well as corruption and the lack of good governance; and violence against women, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people, and Afro-descendants.
Quick: Kamala Harris! Name three global problems of any kind that aren’t caused by racism and climate change, and whose solutions won’t make you more powerful? Because that’s always the acid test of good faith. Does the solution cost you or does it help you? If it helps you every single time, maybe it’s not really a solution.
So what’s the answer? Just kidding. Trick question. Obviously, there aren’t any global problems that aren’t associated with racism and sexism and global climate change and that don’t require Kamala Harris to become a lot more powerful. The funny thing is, no one’s told the Central American’s this. They think they’re coming to Brownsville and San Diego precisely because Kamala Harris is now vice president. Watch:
ED O’KEEFE, CBS: Giammattei says increased border crossings have been caused in part by the change of administration.
GUATEMALAN PRESIDENT ALEJANDRO GIAMMATTEI: The message changed to "We’re going to reunite families and children." The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States. We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.
Oh. So they’re not coming here because of sexism. They’re not coming here because they’re fleeing a culture they don’t like, it’s their culture. They’re coming here because this is a much richer and much more generous country, and now they can come here. So why wouldn’t they? It’s not their fault, it’s ours.
If you really wanted to solve this problem, the answer is pretty simple. You would deport people here illegally. That’s what normal countries do. How much time do Mexico or Israel spend blaming themselves for people who break their laws? Not a lot of time, actually. Not one second. They swiftly deport people who do that. And if we did that, it would get the world’s attention immediately. Because the truth is, many of these countries need illegal immigrants in our country in order to continue. That’s how unhealthy the economics of this arrangement are.
As of 2019, remittances from their emigrants to the United States amounted to fully 20% of El Salvador's entire GDP. Is that healthy? Should we continue that? Don’t we want an independent El Salvador that can feed itself? Clearly, we don’t care.
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This was true essentially in Honduras and Guatemala. According to a recent piece on the AP wire, "so many Guatemalans have left, that much of the country survives on remittances they send home."
Once again, if you cared about Guatemala, you would try to make Guatemala independent. You wouldn’t make it yet another third-world country dependent on NGO and foreign-aid money. That’s a horrible thing to do.
It's the same story in Mexico. In 2018, then-presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador admitted, "These remittances are the main income that the country has. More than oil, more than tourism."
Is that what we want for Mexico? If you cared about Mexico would you want that? No, it’s degrading. And it might be part of the reason Mexico is a disaster in the middle of a drug war, ongoing for 10 years.
Kamala Harris does not care. So her solution is the same solution: give even more money to narco-states like Mexico and Honduras, where the president is under a DEA investigation for drug trafficking.
KAMALA HARRIS: We are launching our call to action for businesses to invest in the Northern Triangle … I believe that the businesses – and in particular, our private business sector – have a very significant role to play, as we all know, in creating jobs and promoting economic opportunity. And in long-term development. I am proud that we have companies already in the United States who have committed to act. We have MasterCard, who intends to partner across sectors to bring five million people in the region into the digital economy and to support one million small businesses.
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This is hilarious, only because no one on the left talks about economics or understands economics. All of our debates used to be about economics. It’s not even mentioned anymore, it’s all race and gender. But underlying all of this is economics. And what Kamala Harris is saying is that big U.S. companies are ready to act selflessly, of course, to get more cheap labor in the third world. They’re ready to act, even as our own labor market does things that no healthy market would do. Unemployment is going up even as businesses can’t find labor to fill open jobs. Something very ominous is happening in our labor markets. It’s being ignored so we can help Honduras’ labor market on behalf of El Salvador, and by the way, send more money to governments that don’t deserve it, that are corrupt, that don’t serve their own people, in the hope they’ll stop invading us, but they’ll invade us anyway because it’s been going on for 10 years.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the June 8, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."